


To Rebuild a Life

by orphan_account



Series: After Crucible [9]
Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-03
Updated: 2013-10-03
Packaged: 2017-12-28 07:54:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/989603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Shepard rewrites her existence in a series of ones and zeroes, a small part of her crew finds themselves drawn together for one final mission. </p>
<p>A post-Control, short semi-chaptered one-shot. Hopefully with a smaller word-to-hypen ratio than seen here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Tali

She chooses a plot of land on a cliff by the sea, near enough to geth territory that she can hear them hum like cicadas through the quiet of night.

Nobody else yet trusts them enough to want it, which suits her fine. Honestly, she doesn't trust the quarians much either; she knows too well that bad blood runs deeper than the tides of peace. By being a rare neutral force, she hopes to be able to fan away the thick smokes of tension already rising from the heated relationships between the two species. 

At sunset, and then again at sunrise, the sands shine warm like gold and the monoliths that tower above cast them in the most serene shadows of blue and purple and pink she's ever known. With enough nurturing, the dried cracks in the ground could fill with little sprouts of life. Fresh fruits, vegetables. Flowers, too, maybe; large and pretty and colourful, which she would use to decorate her kitchen, and her living room, and her hair. 

Sometimes she wonders what it would have been like had her father been alive to take the plot next to hers. He would have worked until his bones were as dry and brittle as the ground, but then maybe he would have retired and spent the rest of his days seated on the cliff, legs dangling over the edge while he fished for food to sell at the farmers' market. Instead, she watches sunlight and moonlight and starlight cast a shimmer against the clear waters and waits for shiny, silvery scales to become prismatic beneath the glow. 

Her love for the planet is new. It will fade with time. But so long has she wrapped up Rannoch in the romanticism of youth; so long has she been infatuated with its unspoken promises; so long has she yearned to wake up unmasked in the morning, taking in the freshness of unfiltered air, being warmed by the real light of the sun, that she exaggerates every good feeling that she has. 

The geth aren't her only storied neighbours. In the expansive desert that stretches behind her home, winds swirl patterns of sand into the sky. Beneath them is a secret. On stiller days she can make out a massive black patch set against the warm golds of Rannoch and she wonders about the legacy that Shepard has hoisted onto the synthetic bodies of the Reapers. 

She thinks of Shepard often. At times she's grateful. For Rannoch. For peace. For a future that isn't darkened by the shadows of a billion reapers but instead made to feel a little safer for their presence. There's a lot to learn from them and from the billions more lives archived within their systems, but that will come later. After Thessia and Earth and Palaven are healed; after the lost colonies are rebuilt; after the mass relays are made functional again. 

Happiness and true acceptance haven't reached her yet, so she spends her quiet time reminding herself how beautiful her home is, how strange and wonderful it is to breathe in the wind, and how lucky she is to be alive. One day she'll venture out beyond the small square of land she's claimed and see what lies in wait of her in that shell in the desert. But for now peace affords her the opportunity to be peaceful, so she is content to focus on being a pioneer settling Rannoch, on serving as an advisor, on moving forward. 

She knows the value of making that choice and so she knows better than to take it for granted.


	2. Miranda

The only trails The Illusive Man resigned himself to leaving are the thin wisp of smoke that rises from his cigarette, the smell of his cologne, and the smear of corpses killed on his command, killed in his name. Everything else found in his wake was deliberate. A tease here, a taunt there, an inch given so that some day in the future he can claim back a mile. 

Miranda knows this better than most which means she also understands the silent rhythm he used to confuse any who would pursue him. With a mind as lithe as a ballerina, she can step in time with its obfuscating beats, unravel the sounds it doesn't make until she's reached the start and can play it backwards to trace it to its origins. 

This is how she discovers the asteroid on which he hosts his data, and this is how she decrypts it byte by byte. First to erase everything he has on Oriana, then to erase everything he has on her, and finally to store away whatever information she finds on some of his more useful projects. 

All that only accounts for a scant fraction of the data he's stored over his years of megalomania. As she sifts through it she learns more than she cares to know about more people than she'll ever meet in her lifetime; scandals and fears and family members; first loves and last; debts, crimes, confessions that the speakers never knew they'd made. It's more than enough for her to lock the chains of manipulation tight around the necks of humanity's power players and play them like marionettes. 

Gratitude is a funny thing. One day it's motivation to drive oneself to death. Then realities realign with the flow of the galaxy and it's a curse, a chain, a knife grown warm at the throat. Miranda would once have protected that information with everything she had; now though, the thought of possessing that much power makes her feel queasy and angry, and before she knows what she's doing she's firing bullets into the servers until they rattle and wheeze with death. 

Shrapnel and sparks fly everywhere.

She falls to the floor. 

Her entire body trembles, and her hands are bleeding, and her knees are bleeding, and her past with Cerberus is throbbing in her skull like a hangover. It's strange, she thinks, but in that moment of brokenness, of lost limits, of an exhaustion borne on a level that seems cellular, she feels perfect. Human. Greater than her father's aspirations, better than The Illusive Man's inclinations towards power, stronger for her own weaknesses of flesh, of heart, of mind. 

It would be a good end to her story. Heroic and lonely and thorough in its destruction of the truth of her creation. She could die there and be happy, feel accomplished, ride the adrenaline of victory to her last breath. 

But it's not the end. Her blood already writes an epilogue on the Citadel and not nearly enough of it spills onto the floor here to smudge her future. It's time to move on from The Illusive Man, to feel secure in ways she hasn't since she was a child, blissfully unaware of the evils of her existence. There's no one left to hunt her down like a dog, no beacons of power to blind her sense of morality, no purpose beyond the one she's longed for eternally.

Oriana waits for her. 

Their apartment on the Citadel is small but convenient. Close to a school where Oriana can sharpen her mind, and to a park where they can relax into getting to know each other, and to a pretty little memorial where once there stood an advertisement for Sanctuary. There, they call upon the memories of everyone they lost to give them the strength to better a universe that still harbours infinite sadness beneath its regrowth of hope. 

It's nothing like how Miranda thought she'd be spending her middle years because it's an awful lot like a normal life. 

Maybe too much like one.

All too soon, the pull towards the pieces of her past that can be reassembled into something entirely her own becomes impossible for her to resist.


	3. Garrus

There are no Reapers above the Citadel sky. 

It's meant as a sign of security so the council calls it an honour and the people use it as a reason to try to keep on living while everything else in the galaxy teeters on the precipice of catastrophe. But Garrus looks into the dappled blackness all around him and sees something different in the emptiness; he sees a quiet expanse in which Shepard now will never rest. 

Everything inside of him longs to return to Palaven but the planet is in such a state of crisis that it cannot accept ships – not even those carrying supplies and volunteers and desperate, needy family members who in the wake of the Reapers have forgotten why they ever left their homes. Even with his connections he can barely get anyone to speak to him, give him updates, assuage his concerns. Nevermind shift protocol around enough to navigate him where he belongs.

With nowhere else for him to go, he stays on the Citadel. 

Sometimes he works with C-Sec, mediating myriad conflicts that arise from having so many people displaced there. The crime rate rises anyway because there are too few security officials to deal with all the grief and the fear and the anger and the desperation bubbling beneath the surface of the docks. Other times he sits on a newly-formed intergalactic advisory board and tries not to turn his nose at all the bullshit wafting from the more self-serving representatives trying to earn priority in a time of equality. 

His ear is always to the scanner. It plays through his visor even while he's supposed to be listening to the noise immediately around him. At night he dreams he hears the words _we found her_ ; in the morning he wakes knowing that he probably never will know how they sound strung together like that. When he can't sleep, he finds a quiet place where he can look up to see the remnants of the Crucible. Its lights have long since faded; its shell recently destroyed by the need for its materials elsewhere. Now it stands as a sort of monument for the lost; a display of solidarity; a reminder of how close they'd all come to the absoluteness of defeat. 

Beneath its massiveness he feels small and insignificant. Nothing like the Normandy hero that the galaxy wants to carve him into with sharpened praises that chisel away at more than his determination to live a quiet, private life. This is a good thing though: this is what helps him remember how to unburden his shoulders and breathe. 

Memories of falling to Reaper lasers still taunt the edge of his thoughts, always there. Once they brought with them more _what-ifs_ than his sense of guilt could contend with and Garrus found relief by burning his throat, warming his blood, muddling his mind with the haze of booze. But behind every thought of how things might have played out differently exists a single constant: Shepard was always going to be lost. There is nothing he could have done to restitch the threads of fate in his favour or to hold her together enough for her to remain whole.

He did all that he could. Everything. 

It's not always enough. That's okay though, because every now and again? It's all that he needs. 

He keeps her tucked safe in his heart and there, at least, he knows she can rest.


	4. Kaidan

Be an Alliance soldier, Alenko.

Be a Spectre, Kaidan.

Be a supernova and blind the galaxy with your devotion to duty, to service, to the grace of neutrality and the glory of victory.

Be alive.

Live.

It's always him who survives. At Gagarin Station. On Eden Prime. On Virmire. On the filthy streets of London where nobody who had their feet on the pavement expected to last very much longer. He's good at skirting the edge of the scythe, at seating himself in positions above which no swords dangle, beneath which no mines have been laid. 

There's so much more he wants to accomplish but right now none of it really matters. He's tired, he's worn down. Weeks after his return to the Sol system, he's still blinded by the limelight illuminating him like he's someone to whom others should pay attention. 

He's good at speaking. The right words don't always come to him, he thinks, but that never matters to anybody else. Kaidan is quiet and solid and he exists within an aura of dutifulness and security, and people put their faith in the honesty of his delivery. The Alliance loves him for it more than they ever have before. They mark him off on their lists as someone to be kept safe, to be protected. Which means that he spends most of his time feeling useful in entirely the wrong way.

The migraines have grown so bad that at times he can barely stand, and he knows it's only a matter of weeks before the force of his fire wanes. By then morale should be in a good enough place that they don't need every healthy soldier to stand before a camera and help the Alliance quantify its strength. He can rise to higher challenges; he can dirty his hands and wear his fingers to the bone; he can survive for reasons other than being treated like glass; he can light himself aflame anew.

Or maybe he can rest.

For now though, he straightens out his dress blues, takes a deep breath, and steps up to the podium.

Major Kaidan Alenko, the first human Spectre, member of the fabled Normandy crew, has another speech to deliver.


End file.
